


my lonely days

by ice_connoisseur



Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: Aliens in a Spaceship, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 21:28:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18819358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_connoisseur/pseuds/ice_connoisseur
Summary: Temperance Brennan and then Jack Hodgins walk out of the lab and never walk in again.Aliens in a Spaceship AU, because apparently I have issues.





	my lonely days

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time Bones was the great American TV love of my teenage life. Recently I've been rewatching, both to remember the best and confirm the worst (made it midway through season 6 before giving up this time, which is a whole season less than the first time through; personal growth, I guess??) For some reason this is what came out of that. 
> 
> This started off as angst but refused to finish without at least a glimmer of hope. So there’s that, at least.

It takes them a week to accept it – really, truly accept it – and face up to the reality that, even if they find them now, it will be too late. And even then they do not give up the search. 

But the Jeffersonian is too valuable a resource to be dedicated solely to the hunt for two missing scientists - not even when those self-same scientists are such a big part of just what makes the institution so special – and the orders come from on high. They are to focus on new cases, fresher leads, the latest artefacts. 

Still. There are a lot of hours in the day outside of those contracted to their employer, and for the first time in their careers they start adhering to the times of a typical working week. Evenings and weekends and middle-of-the-nights are spent raking over the same few clues and scraps of evidence, and when those are all-to-swiftly exhausted they start futilely calling in favours and insight from outside their own walls. 

It comes to nothing, of course. They _have_ nothing. Weeks turn into months and they do not bring their friends home.

  


* * *

  


There is a service, some three months after the day Temperance Brennan and then Jack Hodgins walked out the lab and never walked in again. There are no bodies, of course, and no one dares call it a funeral; there is no closure, no peace. But even setting aside his financial standing and her writing career both of them were respected scientists, widely revered in their fields, and their loss is felt far beyond the small borders of their home turf. 

So, a service. In the rose garden outside the Jeffersonian – and oh, the battle Cam wages to ensure it is thus. Russ has no objection; one summer together after fifteen years apart has given him enough insight into what his sister’s preferences might have been. The Cantilever Group are a different matter. They want grandeur and ceremony for their lost heir, a politician’s showground that would have held no trace of the man they were mourning. Cam fights them at every turn, fuelled by a furious determination to do right by the colleagues she will never get a chance to know better, love more. She fights, and she wins, and there is a degree of victory in that, for all its hollowness. 

There is still pomp and politicians, of course, it is all too high profile for there not to be. But the pageantry is mitigated, diluted, overcome, by those who come for reasons more personal than professional. The Jeffersonian staff turn out in force; Drs Hodgins and Brennan may not have been widely liked – too abrasive, too arrogant, just too damn smart – but they were _theirs_ before they were anyone else’s. Dr Goodman returns and stands apart, grave and silent. Sam Cullen, newly retired and weighted by his own grief, nevertheless finding new corners for fresh sorrow. Caroline Julian, who respects knowledge and skill and sheer bull-headedness in all its guises. 

Those, Booth expected. What throws him, catches him off guard in way nothing has since that ill-fated voicemail, are the families. Husbands, wives, children, parents, friends, a procession of vaguely familiar faces from the past two years, come to pay their respects to those who had helped bring closure to their own loved ones. Some of them approach him, murmur quiet condolences and best wishes, and others steer clear, a silent presence that provides some measure of comfort all the same. These are people Seeley Booth met on the worst day of their lives; that they now stand near on the worst day of his is more solace than he thought to find here. 

He tries not to think of another group, those as-yet nameless faceless future victims, and the closure he knows he cannot bring them alone.

Russ comes, accompanied by an older man who introduces himself to no one and says nothing for the entire afternoon. He has a desperate edge that Booth is all too familiar with, that same sense of loss that has shadowed his own footsteps these last few weeks, and Booth knows that if he cared to think on it for even a moment he would know exactly who the stranger is and why he is here. But he can’t face that train of thought today, can’t follow it to its obvious conclusion and then have to force some sort of reaction on behalf of a woman who always spoke for herself. 

So Max Keenan and Seeley Booth pass one another by, silent ships through their parallel grief for someone they both know they have let down.

  


* * *

  


Something changes in the days after the service. There is no evidence to follow and no leads to track and there are only so many times they can rehash the same twelve hour period. Their evenings-and-weekends hunt dwindles and dies, and by day the lab feels still and stifled, echoing with voices that aren’t there. 

Angela leaves. Quietly, without ceremony or fanfare, a short and to the point letter that contains neither her usual flair nor a reason her departure. It doesn’t need to; the silence of the lab is absolute and ruthless. Cam is only quietly – quietly, everything is _quietly_ these days – surprised she didn’t go sooner. Her first tie had been Brennan, and more recently Hodgins; of all of them, only Zach had lost as absolutely as Angela.

And yet Zach stays. He stays and he works under Dr Edison and offers no reaction when his new supervisor moves into his old one’s office. He stays and he starts every other sentence with “according to Dr Brennan” like it was a conversation they had had only last week and not six months ago. He stays and he experiments and he shares his ideas and results with the empty air. He stays and he finishes his doctorate, and there is a muted victory there, Temperance Brennan’s final, finest work. 

He stays, and he stays, and he stays, and too many variables have changed for him to ever be approached by a shadowy figure on a darkened night, to be twisted by his core beliefs into something he isn’t. 

If only there was a way for those who were left to know what had been averted; some glimmer of goodness to come out of such loss. 

Cam…Cam does not even consider leaving. She mourns her friends, yes, but this is early days, negotiating their way around free passes and unnecessary experiments. It is years away from a time when they would have dropped everything to fly halfway round the world to help her, and there is no way to grieve for the friendships she will never know she could have had. 

In a universe where there is no one to bait Howard Epps, it is this instead that drives her and Booth apart. The disparity in their grief, her quiet sadness up against his fury at his own impotent helplessness. 

Angela walks out one day with the true intention of never returning; for Booth it is a more gradual retreat, but after the first few times the sight of Clark at Bones’ desk is not one he can face any longer. It is easy enough for an agent of his calibre to deputise, to delegate, to straight up avoid, when all other tactics fail. Once he would have leapt at any excuse to call on the Jeffersonian; now there are only reasons to stay away.

  


* * *

  


Time passes, as time does. Zach realises, one day, apropos of nothing, that the date has passed that means he has now been without them for longer than he ever had them. Logically, he feels, this ought to change things, lessen the absence that still nags. It doesn’t though, and these days there is no one he asks to explain the reasons why.

Cam builds the Jeffersonian back up, recruits the (second) brightest and best, and doesn’t aim for anything more than cordial relations between co-workers. Dr Edison is a consummate professional and the team follow suit, and if Cam misses the camaraderie they once built here, it’s a thought she keeps between herself and an evening glass of wine.

There is no one acutely observing Booth’s daily life and so it takes longer for the hallucinations to drive him to seek medical attention; by then the tumour, though still benign, is bigger, and the surgery more complicated. He survives and he rehabilitates, but there is a shake in his hand and lapses in memory that mean he never even considers returning to field work.

Angela travels, paints, fucks. She lives in twelve countries in five years, and if she notices her own aimlessness she does not look too closely at it.

  


* * *

  


And in the end, it is a stranger who finds them. There isn’t a dedicated liaison between the FBI and the Jeffersonian any more, Drs Edison and Addy content with their lab work and the rolling roster of agents who pass through their doors as and when they are required, and so it is also a stranger who witnesses the car slowly emerge from the sand. A stranger, who doesn’t know their histories, has no reason to forewarn the Jeffersonian team before they arrive on site. 

Cam still knows, somehow, from the moment the call comes in. Two bodies just about visible in a car submerged in sand; really, what are the chances of it being anything but? 

It takes Zach a little longer. Just long enough to peer through the grimy windows. Their features are mummified beyond immediate recognition, but Zach had spent weeks watching security footage of these two bodies taking their final steps, and even years later he immediately knows the clothes they still wear. 

He makes the ID without dental records, without facial reconstruction, without so much as touching a single bone. He knows it would have appalled his mentor had she seen him do so, and that bothers him, later, in an abstract sort of way. Like he has failed her all over again.

  


* * *

  


Cam calls Booth first, and then Angela, from the truck on the drive back to the lab, _“we found them”_ messages coming years too late, with none of the joy and relief the words would once have bought. 

She meets them in the rose garden, away from anything that could constitute watchful eyes, to deliver the letters. She’s read enough to know what they aren’t and what they are, and this is not something that needs sharing with an official record. She hands each of them a folded scrap of paper, and so it is that on the same date in two universes Seeley Booth finds the words left for him by a dying woman.

> _Dear Agent Booth,_
> 
> _You are a confusing man. You are irrational, compulsive, superstitious and exasperating. You believe in ghosts and angels, and maybe even Santa Claus. And because of you I've started to see the universe differently. How is it possible that to simply look into your fine face gives me so much joy? Why does it make me so happy that every time I try to sneak a peek at you, you're already looking at me? Like you, it makes no sense. And like you, it feels right. If I ever get out of here, I will find a time and place to tell you that you make my life messy and confusing, and unfocused and irrational and wonderful._

  
Her handwriting is a punch to the gut; he has forgotten it, in the years since, the clear, even spacing of her letters, the slightly lopsided dots to her is, no messy doctors scrawl here. How many times had he seen it, on evidence bags and post-it notes, covering the stacks of paper that littered her desk after a long night’s work? How many times had he seen it, and still failed to remember?

And what other things has he forgotten? 

They sit in silence for a while, lost in their own separate yet congruent thoughts. It isn’t lovers they mourn; rather, the lost potential, the friends they were and whatever more they might have been in the years that should have followed, if only they had had more time. 

There was never enough time. 

“Hodgins said,” begins Angela eventually, her voice cracking on the second syllable. “Hodgins said once, during that first case, after you fired us…he said it felt like seeing something great almost happen, and then not.”

And Booth can imagine it, picture it so vividly, in a way he hasn’t for years, grief and guilt dulled by space and time. All the things they could have done, the cases they would have solved, the times they should have shared, between the writing of these letters and the reading, the sheer enormity of what was stolen from them. 

Later he isn’t sure if it was Angela’s sob or his own that broke the stillness between them, but either way they are both crying, shaking with years of ignored emotion and shared loss, clinging to each other among the blooming roses and for the first time approaching something like catharsis.

  


* * *

  


Eventually they go back inside, retracing steps that were once as familiar to them as their own apartments. They wait in Cam’s office; it’s a safe space, somehow, the one place in the whole building mostly untouched by their absent friends in life or death. They wait while the lab techs collect their samples, while the dental records are checked and confirmed, while Cam shuts down the lab early and sends everyone else home. They would have waited still while Zach completed his exam in the resulting quiet, free to process this task unobserved and unjudged in however he handled it. But Cam has worked with him for years by this point, knows him as well as anyone living can, so she brings them up to the platform, and the six of them share the space one last time, a mockery of their working lives. 

They watch while Zach slowly, carefully, methodically pieces together the story the bones have to tell. Booth is stone, unmoving, his gaze fixed on the figures laid out, trying to reconcile the bare bones with the living, breathing people he had known. Cam is business, emotions firmly buried for later processing. Angela sees their faces the first time she looks at the skulls and cannot look again; she focuses instead on Zach’s hands, gently moving from one bone to the next in the way he was taught. 

Slowly, slowly, finally, they have the story they’ve been chasing for so long. The taser, the strike from the car. Hodgin’s leg injury and the impromptu surgery to ensure him more time. The scrapes and bruises where they had forced their way through the backseat to access a little more oxygen from the spare tyre. The residue in Hodgin’s hand from his impromptu scrubber.

It is so late it is early by the time Zach finishes. They are left with more questions than answers and nothing close to resolution; just evidence of how hard their friends had fought, how long they’d clung on, extending their deadline again and again in desperate faith that they would be found.

  


* * *

  


The four of them spend the rest of the night getting quietly, determinedly drunk, but the next morning nothing has changed; Jack Hodgins and Temperance Brennen are irrefutably, undeniably dead, as dead as they have been for years and yet also somehow more so with the hard proof of it finally exposed. 

They return to the lab; Cam and Zach because there is work to be done, and, a little later in the day, Angela and Booth, because they don’t know how to be anywhere else.  
The lab is teaming when they arrive. Techs scurry back and forth beneath Cam’s watchful eye, in the Ookey Room Clark and an intern are experimenting with tasers, Zach’s voice floats up from the platform, “Dr Brennan always says…” 

It draws them in like a drug. A pair of suited agents stand off to one side, coordinating the retrieval re-assessment of evidence from the other Gravedigger cases, before and after this one. Booth slips quietly over, intending only to eavesdrop but somehow finding himself caught up in the wrangling between departments and agencies. Angela holds out a little longer, but Hodgins left a scrap of something tucked safely between the pages of Brennan’s book, the last piece of evidence they’ll ever ask her to look at. The Angelator is humming away and for the first time in years she finds herself unable to resist its song.

The very best of their collective pasts are here, echoes of Jack Hodgins and Temperance Brennen in every nook and corner of this place. They’d lost that somewhere along the way; caught between the shock and the grief and the sheer overwhelming absence, they had forgotten to remember the joy in the lives they’d once known here. It’s still more bitter than sweet, but proximity is easing that in a way that time never has. 

It’s not enough, won’t ever even begin to come close to what they once had, but it’s a start. A start and an end, the evidence they have long sought, breadcrumbs on the path to…not absolution, not even vengeance, anymore, but answers and closure and _justice_. They forgot, for a while, or tried to at least, but there was only ever one way this would end. The lab hums with energy and life; not loss, nor triumph, not yet, but thrumming with the promise of a hunt that is so very much on. 

And somewhere out in a world that suddenly seems a whole lot smaller, Heather Taffet does not yet realise her number is up.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the title is from At Last, and yes, I did decide that Angela and Booth received the letters in this universe on the same date and in the same place that Booth and Bones got married in canon. Like I said, issues.


End file.
